Home Page Forums MAME MAME How to override key assignments of a machine

Hello all,

I'm seeking a way to export the custom key mapping as a file to override the default key map of each machine.

Recently I received many contacts from visual-impaired people, inquiring about ways to use MAME keyboard emulations on my site efficiently. As the accessibility enhancements are still under discussion at https://github.com/mamedev/mame/issues/5357, I found it seems unrealized temporarily for those people to assign the keys on their own.

As the original keyboards are equipped with real buttons and keys, I think those kinds of actual electronics may be more easy for visually impaired people to operate. To solve this before the MAME becomes more accessibility friendly, I think a pre-defined keymap file needs to be completed myself for people who are unable to do that. Can the user export the key assignment as a separate file, and load it with the ROM, to override the default keymap comes with the machine?

Mame has two sets of key mappings..

The global mapping which is used by default on each emulated system.

And the local mapping - that means you can adapt the configuration for each system individually.

Another one should jump in, but the default mapping of mame is not written to disk,
only if you change the defaults and save the config you will aquire a configuration file
in MAMEROOT/cfg/systemname.cfg (default.cfg for the global settings)
(Maybe there is a way to write the default mapping to disk, but in my experience you will have to change it once before it will be written to disk)

Problem is you can move these config files to the next mame version when it is released, but from time to time there are changes that will break them